The Ballad and the Source

by Rosamond Lehmann

  Two days later my mother put on a black coat and hat and went up for the funeral: my father was joining her in London, she said, and she had ordered two beautiful wreaths, one from us children. She gave Jess a card and told her to write on it in her best hand: With love to dear Tilly from Jess; and then I followed after and added Rebecca; and then Sylvia concluded the ceremony with a piece of tipsy printing which incurred my mother’s disapproval. While I was making my signature I began to cry. That card with its message and our names affixed, so tender, so simple, so final, was pathos itself. Jess asked if Mrs. Jardine was going to the funeral, and my mother said no. Mrs. Jardine had said on the telephone that she had bidden Tilly good-bye at her bedside, and with her own hands arranged on the table a great bunch of roses, the whole late glory of her garden.

  “I hope,” I said, strangled, “Tilly knew they were there.”

  “I expect the scent of them came to her, anyway,” said my mother, mildly optimistic.

  “Did she know Mrs. Jardine had come to say—goodbye?” I gasped out, feeling hideously hit below the belt by the word.

  “No. She didn’t know that.” Then she added, more to herself than to me: “At least … who can tell?”

  But I thought, and think still, that if in any recess of Tilly’s mysteriously shuttered being, some breath had come to her with the breath of roses of her old enemy, old love, Tilly would have peered through one last chink and made a sign. What was it that Mrs. Jardine had wanted of her, waited for? The Word over all, beautiful as the sky—the Reconciliation? Something, just possibly something more that Tilly had shut her lips on all these years, that might flutter forth with her last sigh? Too late now. Tilly had slipped for ever from her grasp.

  I saw Mrs. Jardine once more that autumn. It was about a week after the funeral, when we went up to say good-bye to Maisie before she went off—a late new-comer—to her boarding school. Lessons had begun again for us, and to our bitter resentment an era of stricter discipline had been inaugurated. To pay us out for the general aroma of frayed moral fibre which she had sniffed on her return, Mademoiselle had persuaded my mother that it was in the interests of our health and education not to permit us to go out to tea during term-time. It interfered, she said, with her programme of conversation at the schoolroom tea-table, and with our subsequent hour of mingled entertainment and instruction with the Bibliothèque Rose. So it was a dismal case of making our adieux and coming straight back. At least, though, we managed to leave Mademoiselle behind with her weekly migraine.

  Once again we toiled up the green sheep-cropped slope, damp now and fading dun under the touch of the season, and went past the churchyard and in by the blue gate. Maisie was upstairs, helping Lucy, Mrs. Jardine’s maid, with the packing. One quarter of her pile of new underwear had been apportioned to her for the sewing-on of name tapes; and she was sitting on her bed, performing this task with a huge needle and a heavy frown. We inspected her wardrobe, serviceable rather than ornamental except for one poppy-red frock for Sundays and occasions—a special present from her grandmother. I was enraptured with it, and shocked by the off-hand way she grabbed it up to show it to us, then flung it aside again. Everything now at last was stamped with radical change. That Maisie who had sat with me in the walnut tree, sharing sweets and placing in my palm the secret shape and substance of her human destiny in a miniature frame of blue velvet and brilliants—that Maisie had gone into the past, as irrecoverable as the halcyon weather in which she first appeared before me, saying: “Friend”; and which now still contains her, along with Mrs. Jardine’s rings and her enamelled pansy watch and the portraits and the dahlias and the silvery rug folded at the foot of the mauve couch; and emerging and dissolving through all these, one electrifying figure over and over again, in gauzes, in wraps, in embroidered art garments, doubled sometimes with an apparition—ice-maiden, Snow Queen—white, in a blue cape, behind its shoulder. At the very centre, pinned to the season’s core by that one centripetal force, is Maisie’s face, framed in intricate branches and lucent in walnut leaf light.

  She was not unfriendly; but between us was the sense that we had neither part nor lot in one another any more. Her past had been wrenched off from her, raw, exposed, unmentionable, and she was in the wilderness, her future the undesired inevitable unknown. Snug and sheltered, for our part, in our continuity, what could we say to her?

  “Who’s taking you to school?” we said.

  “Oh, good Lord! I’m taking myself, thanks all the same for inquiring,” she said rudely. “Do you suppose I’d let anybody in this house—? Not likely! Auntie Mack feared it was her painful duty to conduct me to my fate, but I managed to pack her off to Bude yesterday. Dame Lucy here is going to be given half a crown—aren’t you, Luce?—and Lucy’s going to give it to the guard—mind you do, Luce!—and that kind guard’s going to see I’m not kidnapped, all for two and sixpence, and he’ll help me step out ever so carefully at the right station, and there—there. … What do you think?—a schoolmistress with a nice kind face will be waiting, and she’ll say … oh, she’ll say: ‘Can this be Maisie Thomson?’ … And she won’t be as clever as you think, either; she’ll know me by this smart school chapeau—see? But I’ll have spotted her before she spots me. You bet! It’s all as simple as pie.”

  She tweaked Lucy’s ear, and then gave her a hug; and Lucy responded to the embrace with one of those eloquent compressed looks I had observed on the faces of the dear maids at home when one or other of us was in trouble. ‘It’s a downright shame, that’s what it is, and I don’t care who hears me say so,’ were the unspoken words behind the look.

  “Oh, and Madame Jardine says you’re to go and see her for a few minutes. Only a few to-day. She’s not quite up to snuff,” said Maisie, pronouncing her grandmother’s name with a heavy pseudo-Gallic accent.

  She took us along the passage, knocked, and when Mrs. Jardine from within said “Come!” (never ‘Come in’) she opened the door for us and left us to go in by ourselves.

  Mrs. Jardine lay on her sofa, propped on several pillows, the rug over her knees, her lips blue. She was gentle and loving; a little short of breath, she said: she had perhaps been doing too much. This must be good-bye for a while: next week they were going back to France with Cherry for the winter. She was trying to garner her strength for the journey. She told us that Malcolm and Maisie would spend their holidays on a farm in Devonshire with a former devoted parlourmaid now married to a prosperous fanner and particularly fond of young people. They would get Devonshire cream, and ponies to ride on the moor; it seemed ideal. We would all meet again in the spring, she said. She would think of us often, often, and of the strange happy summer it had been. She took a hand of each of us and kissed it. “Don’t kiss me to-day, loves,” she said. “I have not a cheek fit for young lips.” She wiped the faint dew from her forehead with her little fine handkerchief. She charged us to give grateful and affectionate messages to our mother.

  “She went to Tilly’s funeral,” I said. “So did Daddy and Aunt Sylvia and Uncle Fred. There were some lovely wreaths.”

  “Ah,” said Mrs. Jardine. “That is what Tilly would have wished—that the family should see her to her last resting place.”

  “And she’s left all her money to Boy,” said Jess. “A whole hundred pounds! It’s going to be put in the bank for him.”

  Tears brimmed from Mrs. Jardine’s eyes.

  “That is very touching,” she said. “The savings of a lifetime. … Naturally she would have the feeling that it would crown her dignity and value to leave this solid sum in the family.”

  “That’s what she said to Daddy when he helped her make her will,” said Jess. “She wanted her property to remain in the family. She left Aunt Sylvia a gold watch and an amethyst brooch that Grandmamma gave her.”

  We did not like to mention that we had been pierced with a sense of incredulous outrage and indignation on hearing that our infant brother
had acquired a fortune overnight. Were we so much as mentioned in the will? We were not. He, Boy, sprawling at ease, without care or conscience in his perambulator, had casually tossed in the claim of male superiority and bagged the lot. Sylvia had voiced the feelings which our own years forbade, or took at least the sting from, when she bitterly remarked, the morning the news broke: “I bet I was never called Girl when I was a baby.”

  I said:

  “I’ve never been to a funeral.”

  “Nor I,” said Mrs. Jardine. She paused; then with an access of energy: “No, no. All should be said and done before the end. They who are about to die should be heaped round with flowers and friends and words of love before the end. That is the sacred moment. When it is over—it is over. Oh, I have watched, many times watched, beside the final mystery. But afterwards?—no! I will not, cannot be a party to those inflated falsities, those competitive displays of public handkerchiefs, those grotesque, commercial, vulgar trappings, those …” She broke off; then went on to say with a smile: “I have thought: could but the body dissolve, simply, purely, automatically, so soon as the breath is out! Could one but watch it grow transparent, evaporate from stage to stage until there remained only. … What would remain? One inextinguishable spark? I wonder!” She heaved a sigh, shook her head, fell silent, her eyes dilating, fixed. “Dear me, what a wretched awkwardness it is, this problem of disposal! It will be out of my hands, no doubt. The whole thing will be botched, I must resign myself. There is no one—now—whom I could select with confidence … who would see any profound point in according me a last graceful gesture. I must be huddled off with the least possible display and trouble—as everybody else should be.”

  She was talking to herself; and while Jess noiselessly examined the crystal bottles on her dressing-table, I took a last look at Ianthe’s portrait. The room was partially darkened, and in the obscurity the face’s pale oval was barely to be distinguished. I tried again to think of her as real, this child in a dark velvet fitted jacket and a high fur cap, looking over her shoulder, hand on hip, graceful, formal, like a lady. But all the Ianthes, represented and imagined, were equally fantasy figures.

  Then we said we must be getting back, and she bade us au revoir till the spring and told us not to forget her. We returned to Maisie, and Maisie accompanied us as far as the blue door, and we said: “Well, good-bye”; and she answered: “Good-bye.” Then, when we had turned away and started down the hill, she called suddenly after us: “Race you to the bottom!” and came thundering full tilt past us. We swooped after her in panic ecstasy, our breath caught squealing in our chests, our legs galloping off away from our hips like demented pistons. Just as the railings began to rush on us, we collapsed in a tangle in the grass, and lay on our backs, panting, groaning and shaking with laughter. Then we got up.

  “Crikey!” said Maisie. “Fancy having to sweat to the top again! Could it have been worth it?”

  She made a grimace and started straight off up the slope at a steady march. When we got to the turn of the park road we looked back; at the same moment, near the churchyard gate, she also stopped. We waved to one another.

  2

  Next time we walked that way was on a blackberrying expedition with our father. This was an annual event. Each of us carried a walking stick with a crook handle to pull down the higher brambles, and an enamel mug to pick into. My father held the big basket: this was the ritual. We went along the road that swept round Priory Hill, past the drive gates and on, over a stile, to merge into grassy pastures set with bracken, gorse and brambles, and backed by ramparts of beech, still green, but beginning here and there to kindle. The wrought iron gates were closed. Mr. Gillman, who lived beside them in a flint and brick cottage with dormer windows and a garment of clematis and roses, was digging in his front garden, and touched his cap as we passed.

  “Good-day, Gillman!” called my father, waving the basket with jovial implication.

  Gillman responded with a meaning jerk of the head. If he had spoken he might so far have committed himself as to say: “Ah … That’s where it is”: thereby acknowledging that the season, the family parade, the blackberry and apple pudding, with all that this meant in the way of simple milestones and traditional pastimes and pleasures, had now come round again. But he did not like speaking, and he plunged his fork once more into the ground as we passed on.

  “The Jardines must have gone to France,” I said.

  “No doubt,” said my father.

  Christmas brought us a large parcel from Paris: inside it a resplendent box of candied fruits sprinkled with crystallized violets and rose petals. New Year brought us each a card rioting­­­­ with nosegays and gold stars and white lace and silver-­winged cherubs, and inscribed with loving messages from Mrs. Jardine. I slept with mine under my pillow, and each time I drew it forth to gloat on it I was thrown into a strange voluptuous ferment, half physical, half aesthetic. My mother received a long letter, as from one lady friend to another, with news of health, weather and domestic occupations, together with an account of Cherry’s general improvement under the care of a superlatively excellent young governess, Tanya Moore by name, handpicked for various stated moral and intellectual reasons by Mrs. Jardine from among a dozen candidates. She was the daughter of a Russian dancer, who had died in giving her birth, and of an Irish father, a painter, of dissolute habits, living an irregular and promiscuous life in Dublin, and indifferent to the interests of his only child. She had left this most unhappy and unsatisfactory guardianship and come to Paris at the age of nineteen to study music at the Conservatoire. Her money had become exhausted; and not wishing to return home or to appeal to her parent for financial assistance, she had made up her mind to find some way of earning and saving the means for the resumption of her studies, when her path and Mrs. Jardine’s had miraculously converged. Her spirit of honourable independence, her artistic sensibility, the absence in her character of all that was banal, cramped, grasping, oblique—all this Mrs. Jardine found intensely sympathetic. She had seen in this young creature the image of her own solitary youthful struggles for self-determination. Nothing could exceed the perfection of her touch with young children. Her natural candour and equability had given Cherry an instant sense of confidence. “To sum up,” wrote Mrs. Jardine, ‘Tanya Moore has no cruelty in her. She can do a child no harm. Of how many guardians of the defenceless young could one say as much?’ My mother was rash enough to read this message aloud to us, and Jess, smarting from her latest punition, saw her chance and took it with bitter and economical emphasis. My mother told her not to be ridiculous.

  Mrs. Jardine said also that she had thoroughly satisfactory reports of Maisie and Malcolm, and was hopeful on their score. They had been taken just in time.

  It was plain from this budget of news that relations between Mrs. Jardine and my mother were now established upon a firm basis of mutual matronly interests. I do not know if she showed the letter to my father. Certainly she answered it without delay, for I posted her reply myself.

  It was in March, that month of baleful stars, unpropitious to humanity, that there came another violet envelope: inside, one flimsy sheet. Three nights ago, it said, in the mid hour of night, a cry: ‘My head! My head!’ Cherry. Sickness, delirium, then convulsions. The best children’s specialist in Paris summoned post haste: ‘But naturally,’ it said, ‘I knew already. Cerebro-spinal meningitis. Now she is blind. She neither sees me nor knows me. While there is life there is hope. Priez pour nous.’ The handwriting was firm and finely formed as ever, her signature showed all its customary formal idiosyncrasy. She must have laid down her pen, then, in a paroxysm of anguish, seized it again; for at the bottom of the page she had scrawled: ‘I know I can save her. I can do this’; and underlined it twice, with trembling ferocity.

  Deeply distressed, wired my mother. My thoughts are with you. Two days went by. Then came a telegram. Flushing, she tore it open, scanned it, sank back in her chai
r, her colour fading. It said: She died at dawn.

  “This is a terrible tragedy,” said my mother, pale.

  She went out of the room.

  Some week passed before a letter arrived. After reading it, she sat as if thunderstruck; then handing it to Jess, said in a stifled voice that we could read it. It was always curious and unpredictable what areas of experience my mother would see fit to uncover to us, naked, what conceal.

  We read:

  “It was a comfort to hear from you. I knew that you would be able to enter into my agony—you who are such a loving mother. Yes, from the start we were told to nurse her without hope of saving her. There was nothing to do but watch the remorseless text-book forward march of the disease, in superficial ways to alleviate her distress, and to be thankful when her tormented little body sank at last into a coma. I sat for twelve hours and watched the breath flutter in and out, lighter, lighter, slower, slower. Harry had sunk asleep exhausted in the armchair by the fire. One breath. … Another. … Another? … No more.

  “Mary London, how can this be? One moment ago she was singing by the piano while I played. Trempe ton pain, Marie. Sur le pont d’Avignon—Malbrouk—and I said to myself: Tanya is right. This child has music in her: an ear for the dead centre of the note, and ecstasy in those small pure bird-sounds. That is what is pressing in her for release. She is rare, she shall be cherished and brought whole into life. It was the evening of the night when, lying wakeful, I heard her cry. A moment ago. Aeons ago.

  “How is it conceivable that our treasure should be thus sought out, stalked, struck down? No epidemic, not one other case in the neighbourhood, near or far. Her only companions the healthy brood at the home farm. One journey to Paris to buy her a pretty winter wardrobe …?

  “I thought I could save her, my lamb, my own flesh and blood—and I could not. The virtue has gone out of me, I suppose. Nothing has been spared me, nothing. I am mocked by day and by night. An old barren woman. Must I be taught to die, while I still draw breath, that I am thrust again, again—and now irrevocably—into this pit where all experience is a proof of nothing—no warmth, no light, no colour, no happiness­­­­, no love? Like a wounded snake I drag my slow length along. I should be allowed to die, with my TERRIBLE knowledge locked in me. But I must exist a little longer, in case Malcolm should need me.